Don’t Forget the Poets

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
A slow
Delicious shudder runs along her spine
Small birds hide and dodge
And lift their plaintive
Rallying cries
The mountain held the town as in a shadow
He thought he kept the universe alone
For all the voice in answer he could wake
My heart beating, my blood running
The light brimming, my mind turning
I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth

I did not write these words, words that if placed on a spoon would slide off as slow and fine as honey.

Those words I stole from leafing through six books of poetry, lines lifted from poems by T.S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Robert Frost, Delmore Schwartz, and Walt Whitman. I did not have to search high or far for that gold. I didn’t need to burrow deep into those books, frantically flipping through the pages like a hysterical madman in search of the perfect line to show you.

I stitched together those lines from a tidy stack of books on my desk in about two minutes, the glaze upon my weary eyes from another day’s hard work at the anvil washed aside by lines that would inject beauty into the darkest of spirits.

But sadly, the poets don’t get the respect they used to. We are blessed and cursed in our world today with other performers of song, lyric and line that dazzle us with beats and mantras that make those poets and others look about as cutting edge as a Studebaker.

Their words are ancient, some say, from another time that is not relevant to this age of hyperdrive in which the world seemingly spins faster than it did when Frost walked along a stone wall in New Hampshire and pondered some of the deeper mysteries and beauties of life.

Their words are irrelevant, they say, because they don’t speak the language we speak today, nor do they convey the knowledge I need to succeed in a marketplace that doesn’t care about iambic pentameter.

Can iambic pentameter be commoditized? they ask.

And I admit, they — whomever they may be in your mind and mine — may be right.

But I do not write this to argue for poetry’s relevance. I am not here to pontificate about the virtues of reading poetry in a world that has for the most part cast it into the great big dust heap of history.

Those battles have been fought, and much blood has been shed. But I do know one thing.

If we are to write the Great American Novel or the Great American Blog, we writers lose if we too allow those poets to get buried by time.

For the language of poetry is the language of the heart and the mind. It is the rhythm and pulse of what it means to be alive. It is the conveyance of grand high and low intensities of human experience — sometimes in as little as 16 words.

“So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.”

Poetry teaches us how to breathe life into our world, and yes, in as little as those 16 words of William Carlos Williams gold. It teaches us how to make the ordinary splendid. Most of all, it shows us the extraordinary range of possibilities that us constant gardeners of words can nourish and cultivate into a million beautiful things — guided by the wisdom they offer.

In poetry, we realize that words do not just represent things. Words have a pulse of their own, a rhythm, a sound, a pace, a tone, an atmosphere, a gravitas that when carefully strung together create a harmony of logic and emotion that make us weep or fill us with joy.

Words are not just things to be used carelessly, the poets teach us. They represent images and symbols, a fluid history of rich representations that mean different things to different times and peoples.

Words are not just wrote for the sake of writing them. No. Every word forms a great chain of meaning, stretching from the first to the last.

That is what the poets teach us. Every word counts — and not just to meet your word count. Every word has shape and meaning, rhythm and rhyme. And your readers will be able to tell that you don’t love them as much as you should.

“There is a word which bears a sword can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables. At once is mute again.”

To ignore the poets is our loss. Their work is our treasure. But we’re fortunate. Their treasure is everywhere. We just have to open our eyes and look for it.

(On Twitter at: @sj_mcconnell | sjmcconnell.com | guidingtype.com)